Memorial day

It’s an open secret, but still a secret, that the selection process isn’t entirely random. It’s random within the group from among whom the selections are made, but the group itself is selected.

People ask if selecting isn’t difficult, even traumatic, but it isn’t. Many of the selected are happy to be chosen, oohrah-ing and hooah-ing all the way down. One scarcely notes them now.

It’s the others, who resist a bit, or who don’t resist but whose siblings or lovers or parents or friends resist on their behalf, or fling themselves to the ground or otherwise demonstrate … it’s those cases people think are difficult.

But in fact those are the cases that make selecting worthwhile; they’re the reward, not the penalty. If you can’t tell yourself you’ve made tough choices, you can’t tell yourself anything at all.

2 thoughts on “Memorial day”

As apparent as this is, it is hard to see calling it a secret of any kind, open or otherwise. A vision of (very junior) Flight-Lefftenant Bush-the-lesser, in his codpiece and flight suit, making the unscheduled and largely unrecorded visits to Ellington, comes to mind